Online streaming technologies are among the dominant mechanisms by which people consume video content. These technologies rely on video compression techniques to make efficient use of network bandwidth when delivering content streams. Video compression techniques take advantage of temporal and spatial redundancies in video frames to reduce the amount of information transmitted in a video content stream. The operation of an encoder that compresses video is governed by an encoding profile that includes settings that are typically manually selected by an engineer in an effort to strike a balance between video quality and bit rate. The encoding profile that strikes the desired balance for a given video presentation depends heavily on the nature of the video content.
Ideally, encoding profiles could be optimized for every video presentation. However, given the vast and growing libraries of video titles, as well as the many channels of live content that are encoded in real time, such an approach is not practicable. Instead, content providers typically use one or only a small number of encoding profiles to compress all of their video content. This results in a great many instances in which an encoding profile is not particularly well-suited for a given video presentation.